Russia
’s defense industry has “almost doubled” its prewar ammunition production rates, according to a senior
NATO
member defense official who estimated that Ukrainian forces could face as many as 10,000 incoming rounds per day.
“Russia can still manufacture a lot of dumb bombs,” the Estonian defense minister’s permanent secretary, Kusti Salm, told reporters in Washington this week. “And dumb bombs are also 152 [mm] artillery that does the most damage in the battlefield. … Shooting 10,000 artillery [rounds] a day makes a lot of damage.”
That sobering thought punctuated a wider warning that
Russia
has vast resources available to conduct a protracted
war in Ukraine
despite sustaining heavy losses over the past year. And that assessment raised a corollary misgiving that Western defense companies have not taken the necessary steps to provide adequate supplies to
Ukraine
while preparing for future threats.
“The attitude from the industry [is] that ‘we will only wake up in the morning when you put the contract on the table,’” said Salm. “Our stocks are getting more depleted. So we’re not only on the uphill trajectory here with the trend. We are still going down. It needs to be reversed.”
US TANKS WILL TAKE ‘MANY MONTHS’ TO REACH UKRAINE, WHITE HOUSE SAYS
That assessment complicates the picture of Western efficiency and Russian military incompetence that appeared over the last year. Russia’s logistical preparations for the war have attracted scorn in Western public discourse, dating back to the basic failures that thwarted the Kremlin’s plan to overthrow the Ukrainian government in the first days of the war.
Yet Salm, a senior defense official for one of the only NATO allies that share a border with Russia, acknowledged that “mobilization has had an effect and the line has been stabilized,” whatever the shortcomings of the mobilization process. And he expressed displeasure with those who underestimate Moscow.
“It has annoyed myself and most of my colleagues since the beginning, the ridiculing of the mobilization effort,” Salm said. “If you’re a nation who can mobilize 300,000 from the street in a few weeks, in five weeks to get into the trenches — this is an effort that I don’t think any Western nation can pull off just from scratch. … There is also an element of quality in the quantity in itself.”
Some of those mobilized troops were thrown into the front lines with little or no training. Some conscripts were killed within 10 days of receiving the notifications that they would be drafted into the war,
according
to their bereaved families. The efficacy of those forces, whatever their flaws, points to a possible future in which the United States and its allies struggle to keep pace with Moscow’s capacity to bring power to bear in the war, even assuming that Russia has taken “significantly over 100,000” casualties, as U.S. Army Gen.
Mark Milley
, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated in mid-January.
“It’s not actually very much if you have 30 million people in the mobilization reserve; you can afford it,” Salm said, referring to Russia’s losses. “And losing 1,400 tanks is a lot of tanks … but it’s bearable if you have done 10,000 in the stocks. Even if you can make one working [tank] out of three, still you have many times more tanks than European allies.”
It’s difficult to predict the battlefield impact of those potential reserves, he added. NATO allies recognize that Russian officials showed foresight in at least some areas prior to the mobilization drive.
“All mobilized soldiers have the new digital uniforms — all of them,” the Estonian defense official observed. “It means that their military was prepared for these numbers. Mobilized soldiers haven’t showed up in Second World War uniforms. It means that they were prepared. They knew. They know what they’re doing.”
Russia always has lurked as a far larger military power than Ukraine, but the imbalance has been equalized somewhat by the nature of the conflict. An attacking force needs to be three times larger than the defenders in order to succeed, according to conventional military wisdom. Ukrainian forces also have received Western weaponry that is of higher quality than the systems available to the Russians, culminating most recently in Germany’s
support
for a multinational initiative to donate about 80 modern Leopard 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine.
That decision sets the stage for the tanks to arrive on the battlefield in the spring — or roughly a year after Ukrainian officials and some NATO allies began to plead for the transfers to take place.
“The allies are getting to the realization that it’s going to be a longer war. It’s going to be an extremely costly war,” Salm said. “And, in order to manage this strategy, you need to have an end goal. … The reason why we are not there, I guess, is the cost in itself, the fact that a lot of the ammunition stocks have been depleted in Europe. It’s a problem in itself that you need to deal with.”
A course correction will require the political will to make investments that dwarf the current outlays in the U.S. and Europe.
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“The price tag, we know, is going to be a large one,” he said, “probably much larger than the bills that the Congress have put forward and definitely much higher than European allies have put forward.”
